Going to be finishing my Data Science masters soon. Thinking a lot about my future, if it is worth staying in agency or if I should just move to tech companies. For people who work in agencies, do you really use data science? By data science, I mean things that are not reporting and actually doing predictive modeling/ML. Do agencies even hire data scientists? Or it just falls under the general analytics roles.

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Move to tech. Data science in agencies is always an uphill battle. Mostly fighting for client/internal buy in and having the resources to put things in production.

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Yes there are teams doing data science but they are not the best with what other teams outside agencies do for data science. Go elsewhere. You can try it later but only as a last resort. Unless you want to stay agency side, I’d say go elsewhere. Tech companies will most likely open up more doors for your career and better jobs.

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From an agency perspective, a masters will help immensely if the masters program contains a very diverse exposure to the many parts/use cases of data science and the very technical tools you will learn. It needs to help you understand it from a detailed end to end approach and not just the business domain/top line stuff, assuming it’s a quality program and not just some expensive Udemy/coursera/boot camp equivalent. I am not saying these online courses or boot camps are useless, they are still helpful but the masters need to cover way more and deeper. A masters will help if you’re not from a relatable data science background (some boot camps and courses will also provide this help but it will not provide more of the foundational material. At the same time, you have more options now and cost is definitely a factor).

The area most programs seem to be missing is the technical skills, not only programming skills but the mathematical/statistics/econometrics skills to speak with a technical client. They are there to evaluate the integrity and skills of your proposals/models/methodology/choices.

Whether you need a masters or something else varies by a lot of factors so decide and evaluate carefully.

I am not sure if this is what you’re asking but anyone is free to DM me with more questions.

Media agencies and agencies doing more consulting/"innovation"-type work. But most clients aren't buying that type of service from ad agencies.

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The global media agency office I worked in in London used data scientists.

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Also look client side, there are a lot of clients (us included) that are looking for data scientists, to help us build products

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Just be careful which clients. Many clients want to hire data scientists with no conception of what they can do or how to manage them. So they’ll hire a fairly junior “data scientist” who may be extremely smart but has no domain knowledge (client’s business or marketing) and ends up adrift. I’ve seen it happen more than once at older consumer product companies. Probably less likely at tech clients.

But if you’re applying for one of these jobs as a relatively green data scientist, here are two ways you might figure out if you’d be set up for success:

1. Would your boss be someone who understands data science? Not necessarily a data scientist, but someone who understands what data science can and can’t do, should understand the actual data you’d be using and where to get it, and knows more than just how to say “random forest” or “deep learning.”

2. Ask what they hope a data scientist will help them achieve. If it’s something vague like “we want to become a truly data-driven marketer” or “we want to gain a competitive edge by fully leveraging our proprietary data assets” but can’t say anything remotely specific, run. Don’t even finish the interview - say you need to take a huge shit and just never come back.

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I moved to client side after being at agencies for a long time. We are very much engaged in it currently. I didn’t see as much of it agency side. Ping me if you have any questions.

Would love to chat - feel free to DM me :)

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